Rebranding eugenics

Flush with cash, Planned Parenthood affiliates nationwide are aggressively expanding their reach, seeking to woo more affluent patients with a network of suburban clinics and huge new health centers that project a decidedly upscale image.

The nonprofit, which traces its roots to 1916, has long focused on providing birth control, sexual-health care and abortions to teens and low-income women. While those groups still make up the majority of Planned Parenthood’s patients, executives say they are “rebranding” their clinics to appeal to women of means — a move that opens new avenues for boosting revenue and, they hope, political clout.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, reported a record $1 billion in annual revenue in its most recent financial report — about a third of that coming from federal and state grants to care for low-income women. The nonprofit ended the year with a surplus of $115 million, or about 11 percent of its revenue, and net assets of $952 million.

To most rational people, “surplus revnue” is “profit”. So why is about $300 million of our tax money going to this group, especially when it’s not even trying to act like a nonprofit anymore?

Planned Parenthood’s new mission statement, changed last year, is telling. Gone is the reference to the rights of “reproductive self-determination” of women regardless of income, and in its place is a pledge to “leverage strength through our affiliated structure to be the nation’s most trusted provider of sexual and reproductive health care.”

That sounds like something you’d read in the annual report of a Fortune 500 company. And that’s precisely the point.

Planned Parenthood is not a nonprofit and it’s mission is not about reproductive self-determination. It’s in the business of creating a market for its services by “rebranding” sex before marriage, and then cashing in by “rebranding” the stilling of an unborn child’s heart.

But it’s no surprise that Planned Parenthood enjoys record profits — excuse me, “surplus” — just as big money is invested into researching eugenics — excuse me, “neuroethics” — at prestigious Oxford University. Professor Julian Savulescu was just handed £800,000 (about $1.6 million) by The Wellcome Trust to create and study this new field.

Savulescu’s opinion of the intrinsic value of human life is clear: “Biological manipulation to increase opportunity is ethical. If we have an obligation to treat and prevent disease, we have an obligation to try to manipulate these characteristics to give an individual the best opportunity of the best life.” He’s also said that parents have a moral obligation to select the best children they could have.

It’s the same moral position taken by the antagonist in the episodes of Doctor Who Sharon and I watched this afternoon. The villain justified abducting homeless people and transplanting their brains into steel bodies, calling it the ultimate upgrade: no pain, no weakness, no death. And besides, they were homeless. Who’d miss them?

Of course, anyone who tried to refuse the upgrade was “deleted”.

Sadly, Savelescu’s view is not unique in academia. Transhumanism and posthumanism is a fast-growing branch of scientism that’s premised on an almost religious belief in assigning value to a human life by quality and not by the mere fact that it is.

The problem lies with who gets to decide which lives are worth living.

Call it “neuroethics” or “reproductive choice”, it all boils down to a pseudo-scientific and/or moral justification for disposing of the unwanted and defective. It’s a chilling utilitarian view of human life that is simply a rebranded version of Hitler’s Final Solution.